OLD Media Moves

San Jose Mercury News blog celebrates anniversary

October 31, 2005

Silicon Beat, the business news blog at the San Jose Mercury News, celebrated its one-year anniversary on Friday. As near as I can tell, it’s the oldest business news blog out there. The two writers, Matt Marshall and Mike Bazeley, had a nice commentary on the anniversary, asking for advice on how they can make the blog better. They also get a lot of responses from readers, judging by the responses they got from Friday’s post. I also like their advice by asking people to subscribe to the RSS feed.

In addition, their blog has gotten the attention of other media, most notably this Wall Street Journal article.

Becky Bisbee, the business editor at the Seattle Times, also mentioned business news blogs at the Boston and Portland papers in her post on Friday. Here is my assessment:

1. The Boston Globe blog is called the Business Filter, and it’s a compilation of stories from other online media that its digesting for people on the go who don’t have time to surf the Internet looking for cool stuff to read. This is more of your traditional Weblog that attempts to gives its readers a feel for what else is out there in the vast World Wide Web. It’s compiled by Maura Welch, a former Globe writer who is now a contributing author.

2. The Oregonian business blog is called At Work, and it focuses on workplace news. It is written by Brent Hunsberger, who covers the workplace and manufacturing for the paper. I like his blog better. It does cull items from the Internet, but he spices his entries with his opinions and some juicy tidbits about what he’s writing about. I feel like I know more about Brent from reading his blog than I do about the Boston blogger.

I’ve added links to all of these business news blogs in the blogroll located to the right on the home page of Talking Biz News.

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